Guide – Girl Goblin

Don’t Forget your Knowledge – Darkmoon Faire Profession Quests

If you’re anything like me, you’ve completely forgotten that the Darkmoon faire was this week, and you’re scrambling around trying to figure out what you need to do. If you’re leveling up in Dragonflight you NEED to do the profession quests! They grant knowledge. Don’t forget to do this. Also, be prepared. Here’s a list of items you’ll need depending on your profession.

Cooking: 5 simple flour
Inscription: 5 light parchment
Alchemy: 5 moonberry juice, 5 fizzy faire drink
Tailoring: 1 coarse thread, 1 red dye, 1 blue dye
Leatherworking: 5 coarse thread, 5 blue dye, 10 shiny bauble
Archaeology: 15 fossil archaeology fragment

The other crafts / gathering have no requirements.

Guide: Using Point Blank Sniper & TSM to Snipe VendorSell Items

Have you ever wanted to snipe items that people priced under the vendorsell price? Well, it’s pretty easy to set up, and I’m going to show you how. A few notes first – this won’t make you millions of gold, but if you’re newly starting out on a fresh server, it might give you a starting point. It’s also just something fun to do here and there, maybe as a challenge mode type of gameplay. Remember, this is NOT for regular sniping, this is ONLY for sniping items to sell to vendor.

Addons:

You need to have Tradeskillmaster set up.
You need Auctionator, & Point Blank Sniper.

The first thing you need to do, is you need to make a blank shopping list in Auctionator. I made a 1 item list to begin with, then I deleted it by hitting edit item. Hit enter to save, and then close the edit shopping list window.

It should look like the screenshot above when you’re done. I just called the list ‘vendor’ but you can call it whatever you’d like.

Then head on over to the sniping tab. Make sure you have your new shopping list selected. If you’ve got TSM installed you should see ‘vendorsell’ as a price source.

You’ll want to set the percentage to 99 or lower. I personally set mine to 96, so I’m not dealing with every single copper item out there. You can adjust it to your preference. If you want to catch every single item ever priced under the vendor price, keep it at 99.

Keep the scan mode on blank so that it catches what you want – but buyer beware – at this moment in time, due to scaling issues, a lot of gear that shows up is NOT going to be correctly priced. You should ignore any gear that shows up on this list. If you buy it and sell it to vendor, chances are you’ll be losing out on gold. Eventually, this shopping list WILL start to throttle. It might be best to run it for a few rounds, then take a little break when you hit the throttle, then run it again.

After 15 minutes of running the blank shopping list, I made 1k profit, which isn’t great but it’s simple and a bit of a fun change of pace. If you have access to an auction house, mailbox, and a vendor, this could be something you set up while you’re working or paying attention to other things. You can set PBS to ping you when a deal shows up. Mostly, it’s just another neat way to make use of these addons.

Credit for this method goes to ETW from the WoW Econ & TSM Discord. They spent time yesterday showing people how to set this up and testing whether or not it worked.

Deep Dive: How do I make Gold in World of Warcraft?

The question comes up daily in the World of Warcraft econ discord: “How do I make gold” – and there’s lots of different answers, but this video by Atheist Pope explains it in a pretty clear way, so we tend to link it a lot. The great thing about Warcraft is that there is no one way to make gold. There are many ways. When I first started, I focused on just one of the bubbles above, farming raw gold (remember this was back in BFA days, when we were saving up for the Bruto mount, before multiboxing changes, and before the vendor flip nerfs that came at the end of the expansion). As I got better and more proficient in that one method, I expanded. Now I do a little bit of almost everything (I don’t sell instance runs).

The first thing anyone who wants to make gold has to do is to pick a method. I highly suggest picking something you actually enjoy doing because that’s going to make it easier to stick with. For example, I do not enjoy gathering. I do very little of it. The most gathering I do is fishing for the Strange Goop.

I love crafting. I spend a lot of time doing it, and I invest most of my gold making time to restocking my profession characters, working on their factions, obtaining new recipes, and anything that can enhance their progress.

I also enjoy BOE farming, but I do this only occasionally.

AH flipping is another past time I really enjoy, but it takes time to learn the markets, it takes time to learn the value of things on your server, and it requires a bit of gold to get started. Once you spend some time learning these things, it does get easier. I had my rags to riches challenge over the earlier part of the year that went surprisingly well, because of the knowledge I’d already gained.

What most people tend to want when they ask “how do I make gold” is to know exactly what they should do to get the most gold for the least amount of time invested. The thing is, that isn’t easy to answer. It depends on so many factors – and it changes and evolves. The thing to remember is that if there was ONE single thing that was better than EVERYTHING else, all the gold makers out there would just do that one single thing, and chances are it would not be the best any more. Diversify. Find that one thing that works for you, continue to do that thing until it doesn’t work, then branch out.

Garrison gold making isn’t (IMO) as profitable these days, especially when there were covenant tables all expansion (those are being nerfed on the 15th, please don’t try to start them up now) and they are a serious character / time investment. Getting your garrison off the ground with an army of characters is also a costly adventure unless you’re already established. That’s not to say you can’t make gold from it, but I personally think it would be at the very bottom of the list of opportunities.

I also feel like this video leaves some valid forms of gold making out – like vendor flips. Vendor flips are where you buy craft materials for cheap on the AH, make something with them a billion times (like necklaces) and then sell them to a vendor for a profit. In Shadowlands there have been a few items used for vendor flips, and a lot of goblins have charts where you can input prices and see what the gold per hour would be for you. Here’s some of those charts below (I know it’s the end of Shadowlands, this post should have come a few months ago, but it is what it is).

Don’t be afraid to experiment and use resources that are available out there. Join some communities and get involved. Even just lurking in the econ discord might show you a farm/method/item that you hadn’t even though about, or get you thinking about a particular farm that you hadn’t before.

RNG is great, but it’s hit or miss when it comes to gold. When I’m making gold I want to be able to guarantee a certain amount earned, and then I can use that to make more gold. I spend maybe an hour or so a day doing my gold making routines. I do my covenant tables every day, I restock my professions (I have 4 characters on horde on one server, and 4 characters alliance on another), and farming a few static farms once a day for pets / items to sell. The rest of my time is spent doing whatever happens to capture my fancy for the day. Making gold doesn’t have to be an all day every day ordeal – but if it is, you WILL make more gold. I freely admit that the amount of gold you can / do make is absolutely capped by how much time you dedicate to it. I’m very comfortable for the time vs. effort I put in, but I also know if I had unlimited time I could make so much more.

Not sure where to start? Pick something, try it out. Like it? Keep going. Don’t? Try something else. Find that thing that you personally enjoy, and make that yours.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Detailed Guide: Laestrite Choker Vendor Flip

There is a popular vendor flip right now that people have started doing since the cost of thread has risen. It’s not a lot of gold (approx. 4k gph) but it’s mostly passive and pretty simple. If you’re at work or doing something on a second account, it might be something you want to check into. You’re going to need to be level 50+ and pick up Shadowlands Jewelcrafting from Oribos. The items you’re going to be crafting are the Deadly Jewel Doublet, and the Deadly Laestrite Choker.

I personally use point blank sniper to grab my supplies, but you can also just use the default and favourite the items. What you’re going to do is buy these items at these prices – you can go above or below these prices a small amount, but it will affect your total GPH (gold per hour). The lower the price, the better. My prices:

Laestrite Ore: 3.44
Oriblase: 4.12
Angerseye: 3.75

You can also just input your own prices to Pengu’s Goldmaking Sheet (make a copy to make it your own) and work out the math for yourself. For me, the above prices are perfect. I put them in as a list on point blank sniper, and I buy anything that price or under. The result is 4,232 gold per hour. Again, not a huge amount, but when you’re doing other things or have a second account, or perhaps you’re at work – it’s not horrible.

One VERY IMPORTANT THING: Do not forget to get your laestrite settings at 80 silver each from a faction vendor. This is VERY important, otherwise you will be spending too much. I use a goblin in Glitterfall Basin, Ardenweald. They can mail across faction and you don’t have to do any work because they have the goblin racial that provides discounts. Absolutely do not forget this step.

You will get flagged AFK and drop link if you don’t interact every so often, so I tend to do a little jump while crafting (it’ll interrupt your crafting, just start it over) and if you’re using TSM you can actually set your mailing operations up to mail those chokers off to another character automatically while you continue to craft. Just create a mailing operation in the settings where you add that choker to a group, and then when you’re at the mailbox go to the ‘groups’ tab. Holding down shift and clicking ‘mail selected groups’ will cause it to send to those groups every 1 minute, keeping your inventory nice and clear. It does get stuck sometimes, but it’s easy to keep an eye on.

That’s it, that’s how you make some passive boring gold – but it’s guaranteed profit if you stick within the guidelines, get your materials for cheap, and have some time on your hands.

Road to 10 Million

Back in BFA, Samadan made a lovely google sheet tracking the 5 million gold required to obtain the brutosaurus mount. Looking at gold making in smaller chunks can often motivate you to stick with a long term project, realizing that it’s not ‘too’ bad to obtain your goal. Since the bruto mount is gone (and I have already purchased two of them, one for myself and one for my husband) I have needed some motivation to keep up with my gold making. Drizzling Rose has a challenge going on where she’s been using the same chart, and that’s what inspired me to continue on with my own.

I decided I would love to hit gold cap on a single server. Right now my gold is spread between 4 servers, and I haven’t been at cap since BFA. I don’t consider myself a big time goblin pulling in multi millions a day, but I’m a steady casual gold maker who believes that anything is obtainable if you can be consistent. Anyway, my latest goal is to reach 10 million in a year. 365 days. I’ve tweaked the challenge a bit, I’m starting at almost 4 million to begin with, and my daily ‘goal’ is 25k.

Why? I’m not really sure, it’s just something I want to do. I also would love to expand this goal to all of my servers, but I don’t think that’s reasonable at this time, I just can’t dedicate as much time as I’d like to playing WoW. I will of course provide weekly updates, and go over what I’m doing to make gold. I’m also excited to see how Dragonflight plays into it, and to watch how making gold changes (or doesn’t change). For now? Covenant tables and missions are my main gold making endevour. I have 12 level 60 characters on this server (one of each class) which should be a nice amount that I can keep up with.

Have you set yourself any gold making challenges? Let me know in comments!

[Guide] Multiboxing in 2022

We’re going to talk about multiboxing in 2022 and how to do it in a way that does not violate the TOS for World of Warcraft – if you’re against multiboxing, this isn’t going to be the post for you, so I highly suggest you skip right over it. I’m not here to debate your moral issues with it.

In BFA, I started multiboxing for the very first time, and I was almost instantly hooked. I used to have 8 active accounts (downsized to 5) and I absolutely loved the community of people I met through it. They were passionate about pushing the boundaries of what they could do as their own team, and it was fascinating to watch. Then blizzard banned broadcasting software, and a lot of the public became incredibly vocal about their opinion on multiboxers. Rightfully so in some cases, I understand when gameplay is disrupted, it’s not much fun. However, I don’t think that all multiboxers are out to get you.

I stopped multiboxing right then and there. Downsized from 8 accounts to 2, and never attempted it since. I knew there were other ways people were getting around the TOS, but my thoughts on it (and the community) had soured slightly. The thing is, multiboxing appeals to a certain type of person, and it’s REALLY hard to go back to playing just one account after some time. I would look for other ways to entertain myself in game, and none of it came close to the rush that I got when taking on a dungeon with my team that we shouldn’t have been attempting.

That was over two years ago. Now it’s 2022, and yes, multiboxing is still a thing. The community is a lot quieter, more cautious, less likely to discuss anything with anyone for fear of being banned – but it’s there. It’s NOT banned, broadcasting is. So how can you multibox in 2022 and NOT violate the TOS?

First, you need to grab a desktop application called WoWOpenBox (it’s on GitHub). This lets you resize your windows and it also lets you set something called ‘focus follows mouse’ so as you move your mouse around to your windows, those windows will be the focus. It’s seamless and low key. It does NOT broadcast anything. It arranges your windows so they’re all pretty.

You might also want two addons which you can get from CurseForge, one is called DynamicBoxer and the other is called MAMA. These are NOT required in any way/shape/form – in fact, you don’t even need WoWOpenBox, you can do it all manually. I just prefer my windows to be neat and tidy/easy to reach.

Negative0 has posted a video over on YouTube explaining how to set it all up. It’s nice and simple, low maintenance. I have a follow macro so everyone will follow, and I have attack macros but they’re just base game things. I have to move my mouse across each screen and hit a button for them to do anything. I’m still getting used to that part, it takes some practice. It works really well with tanks/healers, because I have assist macros set up and my healer can heal and stabilize the tank fairly easily with HoT (heal over time) then I can mouse back to the tank and continue to let them do their thing.

Is it perfect? No. Is it as nice as broadcasting? Absolutely not. It’s slower, bulkier, and there’s no way I’d want to do resource farming like that personally, all that mounting and dismounting and clicking – but it is fun to run dungeons, to farm transmog for myself, and even to make guilds and unlock achievements. I haven’t decided how long I want to multibox for so I’m just going month to month with gold on most of the accounts, but remember you can also recruit a friend yourself, and earn some free game time in there as well. I’ve missed multiboxing, and I encourage people who don’t know much about it to learn why it’s so appealing. It might not always be the reasons your thinking of.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Deep-Dive Guide: Leveling your alts with Dalaran Pet Trainers

A few people have asked me about how I level up my alts with pet battles. I’ve never written a guide because I find it very straight forward, but I guess after 9,000+ pet battles it might not be so straight forward to someone else. I do also have a complete guide on pet flipping, so be sure to check that out if it’s something you’re interested in. Both your character and the carry pet (the one that isn’t 25) will earn experience.

Addons I use: Rematch, tdBattlePetScript

Preparation: Rematch is a pet battle UI overhaul. I create teams, and import strategies that are listed in xu-fu. If you log in with your battlenet account you can even import your own pets so that xu-fu will populate strategies with pets you own.

tdBattlePetScript is a script that lets me bind a key to my pet battle moves so that I don’t have to memorize the strategy. I typically bind it to ‘A’ – so instead of hitting the numbers to perform a pet battle move, I hit ‘A’ over and over.

DISCLAIMER: leveling via pet battles is VERY slow! This is NOT meant to be a fast method of leveling. It is meant to be relaxing, for those who have multiple alts and are bored, or as a semi-afk method of leveling that requires zero attention. You will earn roughly 2% exp per fight for most fights. Most fights take between 1-2 minutes. You do not need pet week up to do any of this.

Step 1: You will need to be able to get to Dalaran. Level 10+ characters can do this through chromie, but if you’re below level 10 you’ll want to bother a mage to put you there, or if you’re a recruit a friend account you can summon your alt (as long as you’re below level 50). Then bind yourself to one of the Inns in the zone. Once you’re there you’ll want to go in behind the Magus Commerce Exchange, between the violet citadel. You’ll see a little pet battle area with an arena type thing. Another disclaimer: There is NOT always a trainer up!! You’ll have to check daily to see if one is there. Only the trainers are repeatable.

Step 2: Figure out a strategy for whichever trainer is up. Normally you can just go to xu-fu and do a search on the top right hand corner for the name of whoever is up. The trainers are: Amalia, Bodhi, Sir Galveston, and Tiffany Nelson. There are a few other NPC who might be up but these fights are not repeatable. I am not going to get into what pets you need for what fights, that is something you’ll have to figure out. Use the site, it’s very straight forward and there are multiple strategies for each trainer. There are other NPC in other locations that you can use too, but these are the ones I use. I also stock up on bandages with my charms from mission tables so that I don’t have to leave or wait for mend. If you’re lucky and Amalia is up, her strategy doesn’t use bandages and you can complete it to your hearts content. I love those days.

Step 3: The actual fight. The way xu-fu works is on the left side of the strategy you’ll see “rematch string” click that and it copies to your clipboard. Then in game, right click on your rematch tab where you’re going to make your groups (open the pet window, and bottom right you’ll see teams listed), and import the team. Then back on the xu-fu site, below the rematch string you’ll see TD Script. Click this, and head back in game. Back on your team, right click the actual team listed (where you can see the name of the NPC and the team you’re using) and select ‘write script’ – then paste that script in there. When you start up the fight, you’ll have a key bound (mine is A, I’m not sure any more if that’s default) and to move through the battle you’ll just have to press that one key. It is NOT automatic, you MUST enter a key press.

These scripts are not 100% – sometimes RNG is harsh and you’ll still end up losing, but MOST of the time they’re pretty OK. You’ll want to pay attention to make sure you’re using pets that are meant for those battles, sometimes you need special stats, or a minimum amount of health on the pets, or a specific breed in order to win. This is all explained on the xu-fu site.

Step 4: Profit. That’s all there is to it, very simple. It does take a bit to set it all up, but once you’re done, you’re done. I have hundreds of teams created and my tabs represent each expansion, so I never have to think about what pets to use or what strategy is going to work (unless Blizzard nerfs something, which does happen. If you find your pet battle strategy is no longer working, check out the site and see what has changed). If you’re as bored of Shadowlands as I am, and you want to profit with leveling up some pets AND some characters at the same time, then this method might just be for you.

Or not, that’s OK too. I know it’s pretty niche.

TSM Lightning Round: How to craft items to DE for profit

Question:

am sure it as been asked before but I cant seem to find it I am not very good at writing operations how would I tell tsm to look at what I can craft and de for profit or do I need to just keep looking at them one at a time o this is for classic tbc kind of like a disenchant scan for my crafting
Zero WoW Economy Discord

Answer:

In your crafting operation you’d enable ‘override default craft value’ and set it to destroy so that the profit is being calculated with your disenchant value. Then assign the operation to a group with items that you want to DE for profit
Gumdrops WoW Economy Discord

TSM Lightning Round: DBMinbuyout

A comment that comes up a LOT in the WoW economy discord is that the price of crafted goods in TSM doesn’t match up with the math on the auction house, or with the math in their head. That is usually because the method they’re using to reach an overall craft cost does not match the one that TSM is using. Players tend to use ‘dbminbuyout’ as a price source in their mind (ie: I am looking at the AH right this second, and THIS is the price, so THIS is my profit), which isn’t reliable (especially if you’re crafting more than one item) or recommended. The reason is quoted in the discord:

TSM does not reference dbminbuyout by default, and it’s not recommended to do so. You are not in a contract with a supplier to obtain all materials at the same price, and the lowest buyout is only representing the individual cheapest auction as of the last price snapshot, which may be old. Any reasonable craft, or crafting queue, needs more than one material, so what happens if the next auction is 10x more expensive?
You will always have to compromise somewhere between what you could pay, which is the market value, or what you have paid, based on your accounting data.
TSMBot 03/13/2022

To explain DBMinbuyout further:

DBMinBuyout is the lowest priced auction on your realms Auction House, as of the last pricing update processed from Blizzard’s Auction House API. This value is not ‘real-time’, your pricing data may be 30 minutes or older before the next pricing update. If an auction is posted between pricing updates, this value does not get updated with the new lowest priced auction until the next pricing update. If there are no auctions for a particular item on your realms Auction House, DBMinBuyout could be an invalid price source.
Support.Tradeskillmaster.com

Some what related: if you’re wondering why your prices are the way they are when it comes to crafting and profit, make sure you enable your crafting tooltips, and work out step by step the cost / price sources of each stage so they make sense to you.

If I want to craft a glyph that is displaying a nice profit, I can see I need 15 sallow pigments.

It’s really easy to stop here and think ‘well TSM must be wrong! How on earth am I getting 6k profit when I need 15 sallow pigment at 1380g each?!

So then you mouse over sallow pigment:

Now I can see where the pricing data is coming from, and the profit makes more sense.

TSM might seem like a huge daunting prospect when you’re trying to learn all of the components all at once, but break it down into smaller bite sized pieces, take your time, and listen to what others have asked before you. It will make sense, it just takes a bit to get there.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Deep-Dive: Restocking with TSM

Disclaimer: TSM does not guarantee you sales, and it does not automate anything. Every action requires manual input. As one wise person said: “TSM helps you execute a strategy for gold making. TSM is not the strategy. – Gumdrops 2022”

One of the most useful tools that TSM offers (in my opinion) is the ability to restock crafted goods based on variables that you set. This is going to be a very basic introduction to doing that – it can get a LOT more complicated. I’m a fan of starting with things on the base level and then learning and building your operations from there so don’t be afraid to play around. Before getting started I would also suggest you go into the TSM settings and make sure the crafting tooltips are enabled.

First, you’ll want to make some groups. We already know that I love organization, so my crafting groups are organized by specific tradeskill->current content stuff-> old content stuff. You can organize this any way you want. The default restock operations are all you technically need to get started.

This will restock a minimum of one item, a maximum of three, with 100g profit. Now, that’s not always going to be what you want so let’s get a little more complicated. TSM lets you use ‘If-functions’ and there’s a wonderful article written by BilisOnyxia on how they work. One of the common values I like to use is DBRegionSaleRate. I don’t necessarily want to restock something that is REALLY slow to sell (or perhaps never sells). If I want to only craft items that have a profit of at least 50g, and have a DBRegionSaleRate greater than 0.3 I would write my restock operation in the ‘min profit amount’ section to read: ifgt(DBRegionSaleRate, 0.3, 50g) – you can adjust these values for your own use on your own servers. Remember to reference those awesome if-functions that you read about earlier.

When you have a restock operation that you like, assign it to the group you want (you might want different operations for say, alchemy compared to inscription) and then open your craft window. Click TSM groups, highlight the stuff you want to restock, and of course click restock selected groups. What you SHOULD see next is the crafting queue fill up like I’ve got showing in the very first screenshot. You will then want to make sure you have someone selected in the ‘gathering’ tab of the crafting UI and you may also want to fiddle with the ‘sources’ section.

You’ll have also populated the tasklist of steps you need to take to complete your restock. /tsm tasklist if you happen to have closed this or it didn’t open. This list is based on your sources in the gathering tab, so if you’re not sure why it’s making you do ABC thing, check there first to make sure you have the order the way you expected.

As you craft that task list will update, and so will the queue in your crafting UI. Put them for sale, and you’re done!

A few things to keep in mind – if you want your restocking to be accurate, do your AH/Mail stuff first and then restock after. TSM needs to ‘see’ that stuff to know what has sold / hasn’t sold. Otherwise you might end up crafting 10 more of something that you already had 10 of. Another thing that often comes up is the crafting price of something is WAY off base. There can be a few reasons for this, but that’s why we enable crafting tooltips. This lets you see what the exact item is that might be throwing off costs. Perhaps someone put a single enchanting item for sale for 1,000,000 gold on the AH and now TSM thinks it’s going to cost you that much because you’re referencing it. Sometimes you won’t have a crafting value for an item, so it won’t restock. A common solution for this is to check and make sure your vendor sold items have a value attached to them. After certain updates TSM loses that data, just open the vendor who sells it and they should repopulate. Now let’s say you want to manually adjust the price of an item. For example you want a specific ore valued at 1g and nothing else. To change the price of a material, open your craft UI, reports, materials, and search for the item. Then manually adjust it to read 1g (or whatever string you want to use).

Remember that there is a LOT of support for TSM out there, and no one way of doing anything. If you’re not sure how something is going to work for you, create a new profile and play around with operations. Don’t mindlessly post things without LOOKING at what you’re doing. That’s an easy way to lose gold. If you have a question check out TSM support, check out the WoW Economy & TSM discord, and check out reddit. There are people who are willing to help – but the more specific you are, the better. If you come in asking vague questions, the vague answers you’ll get back might be frustrating.